Doctors Without Borders claims that a woman is raped every 26 seconds in South Africa, a figure matched only by countries at war. The World Health Organization has reported that the first sexual experience of 40 percent of South African women is forced. The South African police say there were 63,603 “contact crime sexual offences” in 2010-2011 (pdf). And according to South Africa’s Medical Research Council, one woman is murdered by an intimate partner every six hours (pdf).
One contributing factor is history. South Africans lived under a brutal police state for decades. Under apartheid, there was state-directed violence against civilians, violence among civilians and violence by civilians directed back at the state. One of the many shortcomings of this society since then has been its failure to think through the psychosocial consequences of that past. The sheer relief, even ecstasy, that accompanied democracy’s arrival in the mid-1990s gave way to an unspoken belief that all was now relatively well.

Yet both the victims and the perpetrators of violence, state-sanctioned or personal, rarely escape their earlier experiences entirely without professional intervention. South Africa is showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress on a grand scale.

The gender activist Bernedette Muthien argues that the country’s past has created violent conceptions of masculinity, such as a preference for violent pornography. Here is some sad proof: soon after the gang-rape footage went viral, there were widespread pleas on Twitter and other social media from men desperately seeking to obtain copies of the video, even though it counts as pornography and is illegal.

How can the patterns of violence in South Africa be reversed? Reducing poverty and inequality would certainly help. But the scourge of sexual violence is not fundamentally an economic problem. It’s about unhealthy conceptions of virility that put irrational pressure on young boys and men. Changing those will require a fuller public conversation about the scars left by our violent collective past.

Understanding why such violence is happening is not to excuse the perpetrators. The aim is only to eliminate the causes of these crimes. Our past may damage us, but it does not let us off the moral hook.